Just as American business and industry need workers with higher skills to compete in a global economy, workers need higher skills to get ahead. This convergence presents an opportunity for states to work with their community colleges and other key partners to help business and industry compete and entry-level workers advance to higher-paying jobs. However, many challenges exist. Many adults entering community colleges lack college-level reading, writing, and math skills, so they must enroll in remedial courses where progress is slow and attrition high. Others, especially those who lack even a high school diploma or GED, never make it as far as the doors of the college. This overview introduces a series of reports that provide insight into state policies that may be influential in supporting institutional strategies that can enable low-skilled adult students to enter into and succeed in college and careers. Six key tasks are identified and discussed; (1) Create a shared vision of the state's economic future among key stakeholders in education, workforce development, and economic development that includes the reasons why increasing the number of adults with postsecondary credentials is crucial; (2) Set measurable goals for achieving the vision, including increasing postsecondary access for lower-skilled adults, and ensure that funding flows in ways that support progress toward those goals; (3) Track individual outcomes across workforce education services and into the labor market, in order to identify trouble spots and document successful approaches with an especially close look at outcomes for lower-skilled students; (4) Help community colleges connect in a broader, more strategic way with local employers, in order to link their needs to for-credit college offerings and to help lower-skilled adults get good jobs in demand in the local labor market; (5) Overhaul the content and delivery of adult education, English as a Second Language, and college remediation, in order to accelerate progress and connect these services closely to occupational pathways in the colleges; and (6) Create and expand more flexible and comprehensive financial aid strategies and more personalized career and academic counseling and support, in order to support postsecondary access and success for lower-income adults. (Contains 14 endnotes.) [This policy report was prepared for the "Breaking Through" initiative of Jobs for the Future and the National Council for Workforce Education, funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the North Carolina GlaxoSmithKline Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.]